Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
-
Hi all,
Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net.
We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book:
- Individual 301 redirects for all the pages.
- Change of address via the GWT.
- Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy.
4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000
The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects).
And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain!
Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist.
Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
-
Thanks Dana. Honestly, we have a lot of experience dealing with site migrations - I read dozens of posts and we've implemented our own step-by=step guidelines for successful site migration.
As you can see, sometimes even when you do everything by the book you can encounter some unexpected issues.
-
Yes I have. I could see the 301 redirects correctly and without any further issues.
-
Yes, it sounds like perhaps there is a technical issue here. I like Keri's suggestion below. Also, have you grepped your server logs to see if Googlebot is having issues?
It can taken Google a long long time to take down search results to old pages that either don't exist any more or that 301 to a new page. You may have to resort to using the removal tool. I realize that for 2,000 URLs doing these one at a time is inconvenient, but it may just be what you have to do.
I have some old notes on domain migration that I'll try to dig up, but unfortunately I don't think there's much there that's helpful after the fact. But I'll see what I can find.
-
the URL remover tool would be one of my last options, since I too would be afraid of any authority vanishing with the old link.
Google must have some reason to continue to index the pages and I wouldn't want them removed until I'm positive I gained back all the authority I could, from these old pages.
-
Are you certain the 301 redirects are active and working?
-
Can you add canonical tags to the 301'ed pages?
-
Make sure that none of the URLs in the 301 URL chain are disallowed by a robots.txt file. If they were in the redirect chain, Google would not be able to properly crawl the new page and properly index.
That last point may be what's preventing a portion of the old URLs from dropping, if they are being blocked in the robots.txt file.
-
-
What happens when you go into GWT and fetch fancydiamonds.net as googlebot? Is there some reason that perhaps googlebot isn't seeing the redirects correctly?
-
Hi David,
see my answer to RaymondPP.
Also, what do you mean by saying "you are linking out to your other site"?
Did you see anything?
-
There is a perfect correlation between the organic drop and the revenue – It has decreased dramatically. Of course I checked for Analytics issue but all the other traffic sources have stayed the same. We have big PPC campaigns and the traffic data is correct.
About management of expectations – usually we say that we expect 3-4 months of traffic droppings, but this had taken us a bit by surprise.
-
Thanks for the answer.
That's always a possibility - the problem is that these url's have not too few links (the old homepage is still indexed!).
If I'll use the url remover won't this result in losing all the link juice for those url's?
-
I agree with both of the previous suggestions and thought I would add a comment and a question too.
Seeing a decline of 50% or even more in traffic after a site migration is not uncommon. Hopefully your clients went into the migration with eyes open, knowing that they could see significantly lower traffic for anywhere from 6 weeks to a year, and maybe never fully recover. This sometimes happens. That's why the planning process is so important (and management of expectations).
That being said, when you installed Google Analytics on the new site, did anything change in your GA tracking code? Sometimes this happens and can lead to old analytics reports and new analytics reports not being an "apples to apples" comparison. It's just a thought. It could be that the traffic isn't actually 50% lower, but has changed much less than that.
Has revenue (or whatever your conversion goal is) dropped, increased or stayed the same?
-
I'm not understanding why your traffic is lower. If you have 301 redirects in place, even if your old pages show up and someone clicks the link, it will take them to the new site.
Another option you could pursue is a 410 (gone) for your old pages. This states to Google that the page has been removed and should no longer be indexed or linked.
But beware, you are linking out to your other site.
The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404.
-
Hi skifr - Have you tried using the URL remover tool in GWT? And if you really want those pages out of the search engine, how about a noindex tag on the old domain?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Why My site pages getting video index viewport issue?
Hello, I have been publishing a good number of blogs on my site Flooring Flow. Though, there's been an error of the video viewport on some of my articles. I have tried fixing it but the error is still showing in Google Search Console. Can anyone help me fix it out?
Technical SEO | | mitty270 -
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
How do I direct users to site page when they search vanity URL?
My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?
Technical SEO | | jarjarjarvis0 -
What is the best way to redirect visitors to certain pages of your site based on their location?
One website I manage wants to redirect users to state specific pages based on their location. What is the best way to accomplish this? For example a user enters the through site.com but they are in Colorado so we want to direct them to site.com/colorado.
Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Sitemap all of a sudden only indexing 2 out of 5000+ pages
Any ideas why this happened? Our sitemap looks the same. Also, our total number of pages indexed has not decreased, just the sitemap. Could this eventually affect my pages being in the index?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Pages not indexed by Google
We recently deleted all the nofollow values on our website. (2 weeks ago) The number of pages indexed by google is the same as before? Do you have explanations for this? website : www.probikeshop.fr
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
If googlebot fetch doesnt find our site will it be indexed?
We have a problem with one of our sites (wordpress) not getting fetched by googlebot. Some folders on the url get found others not. So we have isolated it as a wordpress issue. Will this affect our page in google serps anytime soon? Does any whizz kid out there know how to begin fixing this as we have spent two days solid on this. url is www.holden-jones.co.uk Thanks in advance guys Rob
Technical SEO | | wonderwall0